Farm tours & workshops.

The farm tour

Forty-five minutes, walking the whole cycle in the order it happens: substrate mixing, the sterilisation and inoculation side, the dark incubation room, and then the fruiting rooms — which is the part people remember. Warm, humid, and full of mushrooms growing visibly out of vertical blocks at eye level. It ends in the cold room, where the difference between a mushroom cut an hour ago and one bought on a shelf becomes obvious rather than theoretical.

Tours run by arrangement rather than on a fixed schedule, because harvest mornings are non-negotiable. Tuesday and Friday visitors get to see the cut in progress, which is worth timing for.

Grow-your-own workshop

Two hours, hands-on, and everybody leaves with a colonised block that will fruit on a kitchen counter within a fortnight. Covered: what mycelium actually is, why sterility matters, how to read a block, humidity and fresh air for home fruiting, when to cut, and how to get a second flush. The failure modes are the useful half — most first-time home growers lose a block to the same three mistakes, and knowing them in advance is the whole value.

Written versions of the same material are in the grow guides, and blocks and kits are in the shop.

Cooking sessions

Ninety minutes, six species, one technique that applies to all of them — heat first, fat second — and then the species-specific variations: pressing lion’s mane, scoring king trumpet coins, crisping pink oyster, roasting maitake in wedges. Everyone cooks, and everyone eats. It is the fastest way to turn a curious market customer into someone who buys mushrooms every week.

The honest reason we run these: a tour or a workshop converts at a rate no advertising touches, and the people who come become the ones who bring other people to the market stall.

Groups

• Schools. Biology, food systems and agriculture, pitched at the year group. Spent blocks go home with the class for a garden project — see spent substrate.
• Mycological societies and garden clubs. The cultivation side, in as much technical depth as the group wants.
• Restaurant teams. Front and back of house together — a server who has stood in a fruiting room sells the dish differently. Usually paired with a tasting.
• Company teams and private groups. Tour plus cooking session, up to a sensible number for the space.

Practical notes

• Closed shoes, and clothes you do not mind being warm in — fruiting rooms sit near 90% humidity.
• Photography is welcome everywhere except the lab-side inoculation area.
• Not suitable for anyone with a significant mould or fungal-spore allergy; spore load in a fruiting room is real.
• Farm pickup can be combined with a visit — order by Monday and collect on a harvest day.

Booking

Tours, workshops and group visits are all arranged directly — tell us the group, rough numbers and a couple of possible dates, and we will fit it around the harvest week described in a week on the farm. Get in touch here.

Common questions